as though the
place was vacant, not so much as moving his eye from the direct path. He
came and went, solitary and self-contained, proud, cold, and revengeful.

But this indifference was caused by sensitiveness and the feeling that he
had been slighted. The dark lines relaxed, and his face wore a kindly glow
whenever his teacher went to his desk--if the split-log bench for a
book-rest might be so called. "I would give my life for Gretchen and you,"
he said one day to Mr. Mann; and added: "I would save them all for you."

There was a cluster of gigantic trees close by the school-house, nearly
two hundred feet high. The trees, which were fir, had only dry stumps of
limbs for a distance of nearly one hundred feet from the ground. At the
top, or near the top, the green leaves or needles and dead boughs had
matted together and formed a kind of shelf or eyrie, and on this a pair of
fishing eagles had made their nest.

The nest had been there many years, and the eagles had come back to it
during the breeding season and reared their young.

For a time after the opening of the school none of the pupils seemed to
give any special attention to this high nest. It was a cheerful sight at
noon to see the eagles wheel in the air, or the male eagle come from the
glimmering hills and alight beside his mate.

One afternoon a sudden shadow like a falling cloud passed by the half-open
shutter of the log school-house and caused the pupils to start. There was
a sharp cry of distress in the air, and the master looked out and said:

"Attend to your books, children; it is only the eagle."

But again and again the same swift shadow, like the fragment of a
storm-cloud, passed across the light, and the wild scream of the bird
caused the scholars to watch and to listen. The cry was that of agony and
affright, and it was so recognized by Benjamin, whose ear and eye were
open to Nature, and who understood the voices and cries of the wild and
winged inhabitants of the trees and air.

He raised his hand.

"May I go see?"

The master bowed silently. The boy glided out of the door, and was heard
to exclaim:

"Look! look! the nest--the nest!"

The master granted the school a recess, and all in a few moments were
standing without the door peering into the tall trees.

The long dry weather and withering sun had caused the dead boughs to
shrink and to break beneath the great weight of the nest that rested upon
them. The eagle's nest was in ruins. It had fallen upon the lower boughs,
and two young half-fledged eaglets were to be seen hanging helplessly on a
few sticks in mid-air and in danger of falling to the ground.

It was a bright afternoon. The distress of the two birds was pathetic, and
their cries called about them other birds, as if in sympathy.

The eagles seldom descended to any point near the plain in their flight,
but mounted, as it were, to the sun, or floated high in the air; but in
their distress this afternoon they darted downward almost to the ground,
as though appealing for help for their young.

While the school was watching this curious scene the old chief of the
Umatillas came up the cool highway or trail, to go home with Benjamin
after school.

The eagles seemed to know him. As he joined the pitying group, the female
eagle descended as in a spasm of grief, and her wing swept his plume. She
uttered a long, tremulous cry as she passed and ascended to her young.

"She call," said the old chief. "She call me."

"I go," said Benjamin, with a look at his father.

"Yes, go--she call. She call--the God overhead he call. Go!"

A slender young pine ran up beside one of the giant trees, tall and green.
In a moment Benjamin was seen ascending this pine to a point where he
could throw himself upon the smallest of the great trees and grasp the
ladder of the lower dead branches. Up and up he went in the view of all,
until he had reached a height of some hundred and fifty feet.